Colour my Universe 2

Having a dull day? Spare a thought for the Universe - it just found out that to outsiders it always looks the one colour ... and that colour's beige!

By Karl S. Kruszelnicki

Last time I talked about some astronomers who in January 2002 unleashed upon the world the News that they had (by gathering the light from untold trillions of stars visible to stargazers here on Earth) worked out the Colour of the Universe. Now different people would come up with many different versions of exactly what you mean by Colour of the Universe, but what the astronomers meant, was the colour you would see if you could somehow magically take yourself outside the Universe and turn back and look upon it. They had worked out that the Cosmic Colour was a very pale turquoise - but they were terribly wrong.

You see, while the Astronomers were very good at being Astronomers, they didn't have any training at being Colour Scientists. Soon after the media picked up on their little footnote about the Universe being turquoise in colour, a certain Colour Scientist called Mark Fairchild from the Munsell Colour Science Laboratory at the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York, contacted the Astronomers.

Now Fairchild was a real heavy - in fact, he was such an expert that he wrote the famous (famous to colour scientists, at least) book called Colour Appearance Models, which discusses how colours appear to the human eye. Being a colour scientist, he was quickly able to work out that their freeware computer program had automatically and incorrectly set a little feature called the White Point. Now the White Point is that point at which something which is truly white appears white in the light around you. If you've got a sheet of white paper, it'll look white under white sunlight - but if you take it into a Blue Light Disco, it'll look blue. So the white point is different for sunlight and a blue-lit discoteque.

Fairchild worked with the two astronomers to give them the correct White Point for analysing all their colours. This gave them a different colour of the Universe - as seen by our imaginary person standing outside the Universe. They adjusted the White Point to the perception of an observer looking at the light in a darkened room - and the Universe was no longer a pale turquoise, but beige. The colour of the Universe was so faint and weak that if you adjusted your environment to be daylight, the colour of the Universe would become faint red, while if you were to put the entire Universe inside a room and illuminate it with indoor light, it would look bluish. But for an observer looking at the Universe from outside, lit only by the Universe, it would be beige.

In general, scientists are much better than other people in our society at admitting their mistakes. Karl Glazebrook took all the responsibility square on the chin, and said, "It's our fault for not taking the colour science seriously enough. I'm very embarrassed, I don't like being wrong, but once I found out I was, I knew I had to get the word out."

So the astronomers released their correction onto the world media, many of whom had a go at them for being wrong in the first place. Bible Doctrine News, which had gloried in the knowledge that their previous colour for the Universe, green, was the same as the colour surrounding the Throne of God (as discussed in Revelation, Chapter 4, Verses 2 and 3) didn't really mind. They said that "...the new colour is more reasonable, since when all the colours of the rainbow combine, the colour is white light. The new colour, although not the emerald green hue of the rainbow around the Throne of God still agrees with the Bible. Of course, the scientists haven't been able to see the Throne of God yet. White is the colour for sanctification. This means that a mistake has now been sanctified or corrected."

And their fellow astronomers didn't really mind either. After all, humans are not perfect and when we do make a mistake, it's good to admit it straight away. In fact, if you were to compare scientists with other professions, you would probably find that scientists are the quickest to openly admit their mistakes. They even set up their Astronomers' Choice Homepage and came up with 10 favourite names for this rather nondescript beige that apparently colours our Universe - and the top three were Skyvory, Cosmic Latte and Big Bang Buff.

Of course, the colour beige is famous amongst Colour Theorists for having more synonyms for it (some 50 or so) than any other colour. So you can call beige anything from almond to fallow to putty, or even wheaten.

But this leaves us with one problem still remaining. Visionaries often tell us that the only way to achieve true enlightenment is to become one with the Universe. Does this mean we have to become one with beige...?